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"Home money": family budget

■Family and home
■Advice

by Ekaterina Shcherbakova - Sep 5, 2016

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Often, many families are faced with the problem of lack of funds for everyday expenses, buying any large item, forget about the annual vacation at sea... The reason for this is simple - they do not know where and what exactly their money is "going" to. But apart from expenses, they can easily exceed revenues. Therefore, today we will try to figure out together how to correctly plan a family budget.

How to manage a family budget

To begin with, consider the basic rules and principles of maintaining a family budget:

First of all, start a special notebook or download a program in which you will keep all records.
Budget together, when both husband and wife are involved, it is much easier to control current expenses and plan for future ones.
To get the most complete picture, collect data on them for at least 2-3 months to analyze all income and expenses.
Consider absolutely all expenses, especially small ones, for example, for a chocolate bar for a snack, a cup of coffee in a coffee shop. Often we remember only large purchases, but such "little things" can be from 10-30% per month of your budget. Therefore, do not be lazy and fix everything at once.
Record all your expenses in the program every day, it takes very little time and greatly simplifies the whole process;
At first, plan your budget for a period of no more than 1 month, you can gradually increase the time period up to six months and a year.
Be sure to decide what type of budget you have: joint, split, or mixed.
For your own motivation, set a goal for yourself, for example, a trip to the long-awaited vacation or buying something that your family needs, but there was always not enough money for it.

How to save your family budget

When talking about saving, the most important thing is not to go to extremes, starting to deny yourself all the little things and joys of life. Think carefully about what your family can fully or partially do without, and be sure to weigh the pros and cons.

We offer you several options on what you can save on:

Pay attention to the favorable rates of mobile operators and Internet providers.
Electricity and water. Install energy-saving light bulbs, make it a habit to turn off the lights, replace the daily warm bath with washing in the shower.
Stock up on groceries and plan menu immediately for a week, and on other days buy essential goods, such as bread, milk, and so on.
Try to eat all the food you buy, because food that gets spoiled and thrown away is your wasted money.
Avoid disposable items, such as paper towels, plastic dishes, vacuum cleaner bags at one time, and by installing a filter to purify water, you can save on buying bottled water.
Organize wisely family holiday... Go for walks in a park where there are no attractions more often. If possible, visit entertainment complexes on weekdays, on such days prices are usually lower there. Or, limit the number of trips on weekends, 1-2 times a month will be enough.
Some things can be bought "hand-held", for example, a used bicycle or scooter will give a child no less pleasure than a new one, which costs twice as much.

How to distribute your family budget

In order to reveal your hidden financial "reserves" and not get bogged down in debt, it is very important to correctly distribute the family budget.

He usually has:

Two items of income - wages husband and wife;
Four items of expenditure: general for the needs of the family, for children, personal spending of each spouses.

The total costs, in turn, are divided into:

Permanent: utility bills, education, Internet, cable TV, mobile communications, etc.
Variables: food, household chemicals, clothes, rest, entertainment.

In this case, the main thing is to do everything in stages:

First of all, always pay off your debts and close the next loan payment, otherwise they will grow like a snowball.
Allocate funds to the reserve and accumulative funds, but this is on the condition that you have no debts. Although money for unforeseen expenses should be left in any case.
Then pay the fixed costs.
Distribute whatever remains to variable expenses, children, and your needs.

Family budget table

At its core, the family budget is a table that shows the planned and actual income and expenses of your family.

You can draw it by hand in a notebook, but in the age of information technology, it is much easier to use the electronic version in MS Excel. When compiling it, you can include those categories there that are right for you.

And remember, the more detailed you describe all your spending, the easier it will be for you to analyze and control them.

Below is a table as an example.

Family budget programs

Today there are a large number of different programs and online services for home bookkeeping. Their advantages are that they can save you time by automating some of the calculations of your income and expenses. Developers offer free and paid versions of such software.

Here are some of the most popular and easy-to-use ones: